


One Bullet Left

by melanshi



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Characters as Humans, Alternate Universe - Town of Salem, Attempted Murder, Betrayal, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Gender-Neutral Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Gun Violence, M/M, Murder, Mutual Pining, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Character Death, Slow Burn, eventually, everyone is gonna get traumatized wooooo, people are gonna die woooo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-08
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-01-31 00:10:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12664287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melanshi/pseuds/melanshi
Summary: The town had three unwritten rules: don't go out on a full moon, don't trust anyone, and don't fall in love with people trying to kill you. Fortunately and unfortunately, no one pays attention to those things anymore. Especially the last one.





	One Bullet Left

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't going to post this until Thanksgivingish but my girlfriend convinced me to. Well, here we go!

The cold soaked through Lance’s thin shirt and his legs felt like jello but he knew he couldn’t stop. Thus, he kept walking, despite the ache in his knees begging him to stop. He dared not turn back, lest someone be waiting for him, be it a mafioso or a coven member or even the werewolf that was rumored to lurk in the night. He also dared not to run, lest someone see him and consider it suspicious. As if being out in the dead of night wasn’t suspicious on its own. Or the fact that his boots were splattered with crimson red blood.

His reaction to Haxus’s death, when it was announced two mornings ago, was what gave Sendak away. His neutral expression had faltered for a moment, briefly replaced by one of shock and mild anger, yet he had known well enough to cover it up again. But he was too slow in doing so. Lance had seen him.

He would have left it to mere suspicion, had Plaxum not pulled him, the confirmed vigilante, aside the previous morning and confided in him that she was investigator and that Sendak had the potential to be mafioso. Or pirate. Or ambusher. Or vigilante. Or veteran.

A 3/5th chance of getting a non-town member was a good enough chance to take for him. He decided to trust her and went for it.

He found Sendak, outside his own house, no doubt waiting for the chance to strike against him. The very thought made him shiver. As did the sight of the gun holstered at his potential killer’s waist.

The curtain was pulled aside by a steady hand. The gun was aimed directly at his skull. And he fired.

Sendak didn’t have a chance to look up at the second floor window, where the bullet had been fired from. It struck him directly in the skull and pushed through, as if bone was nothing but butter.

And then it all went quiet.

Lance’s own nervous breathing was the only thing that sounded into the moonlit night in the brief second after the impact. Then, there was the sickening thud as the body collapsed onto the cold dirt.

He didn’t waste a second in fleeing his own house. He had shot another before, a forger whose name was lost in his mind, muddled within the names of the other town members and non-town members who had been struck down in the dark or had their lives extinguished with the votes of their peers and the noose itself. But that other one had not been at his house, waiting for the chance to kill _him._

The rifle still smoking and the yell of the shot still ringing in his ears, he rushed down the creaky stairs, not even bothering to grab a jacket, and pushed the back door open. He didn’t close it behind him. He just walked through as quick as possible and followed where his feet were taking him.

His feet, it seemed, took him to where the body lay on his lawn. Ignoring that he had stepped into the pool of blood, he knelt down to observe his victim.

He had never seen a dead body so fresh and so… close. A perfect circle had been drilled straight through his head, splattered with blood and pieces of torn brain. The bullet itself rested on the ground, no longer a grayish-black but a sickening red. His lips were parted slightly and Lance numbly wondered what he would say if he could still speak. The eyes… the eyes remained open and wide, shocked even in death that he had not seen his fate until it hit him… literally. Lance reached out and quickly closed them, shivering at the fading warmth of the body.

The shock returned at once and he sprang to his feet. Hunk. He needed to see Hunk. He needed to talk to him. He needed to… he needed to… He took off.

Which brought him to where he was, standing, rifle gripped tightly in one hand, the other raised to knock on his friend's door. He banged hard on the door thrice and paused, counting slowly to ten. He gently knocked twice more, barely touching the wood. He paused again, this time to count to three, and then banged once and knocked twice.

Somewhere, a scream erupted, preceded by no gunshot. Someone caught in a trap potentially. Or stabbed. Or caught by a coven member.

The knock was a code they had come up with, years and years back, as everything in the town started to get worse and worse. They meant each other no harm and the knock was put in place to let the other know that it was them, just wanting to be saved from the horrors of the night.

Except it was not Hunk who opened the door, but Pidge. The most recent member of their trio looked up, nonchalantly at the vigilante, as if having been expecting him.

“Pidge, what--”

He couldn’t even finish the sentence before they grabbed him and dragged him into the house.

“I heard the gunshot and figured it was you,” they said, sitting down on a chair near Hunk’s fireplace, where a fire crackled, warring off the cold of the night. “Take off your boots at the door. You don’t want to track blood inside.”

Lance did as they told him and joined them at the fireplace, warming up his toes and rubbing his cold arms. A pitcher was placed on the mantel, full of what appeared to be warm apple cider. He took a glass placed next to it and poured himself a cup.

“What are you doing here?” he finally asked.

Pidge shrugged. “Waiting for my trap to go off. I’ll check in the morning if it did.” They glanced at the window and took a slow sip of their own apple cider. “Although judging by that scream a minute ago, it might have.”

“And Hunk?”

They shrugged. “Tracking someone probably.”

His adrenaline wearing off, Lance collapsed on a couch, just barely managing to avoid spilling his drink. He clenched his eyes shut. All he saw was Sendak’s lifeless eyes staring up at him. They were everywhere. In Pidge’s brown eyes, in the cup he held, in the reflection of his own face on the rifle...

The cup and rifle were dropped onto the floor and, without a word to the confused Pidge, he fled to the bathroom. He locked the door behind him with a click and leaned over the sink, not even bothering to turn the lights on.

In the drain, all he saw were those damn lifeless eyes.

* * *

 

Acxa tapped her foot impatiently as she waited near the well. Lotor should have been here already, with orders for her and the hex master, who was no doubt already waiting under the elm tree on the opposite end of town. Hesitantly, she wondered if he could have been the victim of the gunshot that she had heard earlier or the source of the disembodied scream. No, no. The scream was in no way Lotor. She knew his voice. That was not it.

But the gunshot?

She leaned back against the well and breathed, watching as her breath fogged in the night air. What month was it again? October? November? Was it the end of September? She’d lost track. It was definitely not December. That she knew. The first snow had not yet occurred to announce it.

Footsteps approaching snapped her out of her thoughts and she looked up to see Lotor’s familiar form approaching, as he had last night and the night before and the night before that. Except tonight, he donned a coat, unlike her. A smart choice, no less, considering the chill.

“Good evening,” he greeted with a nod.

“Evening yourself, Lotor,” she responded. “Who does Haggar want poisoned tonight?”

“She wasn’t too picky,” he shrugged. “You can decide tonight, just make sure you poison someone.”

That was easy. It wasn’t the first time she had allowed her to pick a victim. She let her do it often, whenever the coven had no one they were hunting after or when the mafia was after no one in particular.

The mafia.

The mafia and them had been allied for years now, since before even she was born. They worked together. They conspired together. They killed together. She often wondered though what would happen when the town was gone. After all, only one group could be left.

She pushed aside her musings. “Should I expect the same orders for who to have hexed?”

He nodded. Through his calm, she knew he was yearning for a specific target to kill.

She nodded back in acknowledgement. “Thank you. I’ll deliver the message. Vrepit sa.”

“Vrepit sa,” he repeated. He walked past her, in the direction of the graveyard, no doubt to fulfil his own job for the night.

Acxa wasted no time once he left. Wrapping her arms around her, she made her way towards the town.

* * *

 

“No interesting news from you either?”

“No. Zarkon has given no specific orders. It appears that he does not have a set target in mind as of the current moment.”

A sigh. “Indeed. Both the mafia and the coven kills have seemed very random lately.”

“Because they’re killing randomly. Any ideas on how to finish Haggar off?”

“We’re not killing her yet. We need her to know how to defeat Zarkon.”

“And without her dead, I can’t finish the job I started on Zarkon.”

“Patience. The time will come. And then we can put an end to both the mafia and the coven.”

“...I don’t--”

“Don’t make me repeat myself. No one is to engage until I say so.”

* * *

 

The body lay abandoned in the grass and Acxa nearly jumped when she first saw it. An older man with a patch on his chest, displaying the symbol of Zarkon… a mafioso.

She approached slowly, as if not to disturb the dead, and bent down to observe it. Even with blood splattered across his face, she recognized him as Sendak, one of Zarkon’s most trusted men. Her eyes moved to his forehead. A bullet hole, clean through his skull. Unless a transporter had transported him and he’d been attacked by another mafioso, he was attacked by either a veteran or a vigilante.

She looked back at the house, an older wooden one. This was not the veteran’s house. If it was, she would be dead already. No, this house belonged to Lance McClain. A confirmed vigilante.

But was McClain the one who shot Sendak? Or had another vigilante done it?

She looked at the bullet hole that the victim now sported. It cut through his head at a downwards angle. The bullet had to have been shot from up high.

And true to her theory, a window on the second story was open, the curtains inside blowing in the breeze coming through it.

Did she honestly care that Sendak, a mafioso, was dead? No. No, she did not. But the thought that that could one day be her lying in the grass with a bullet hole through her head shook her to the core. She abandoned the body and ran.

* * *

 

The elm tree resided behind a house on the edge of town. The only reason that her fellow coven member and her had agreed to it was due to the fact that the owner of the house never seemed to be home.

Until tonight, it seemed.

Smoke billowed out of the chimney and light shone through the tightly drawn curtains, making Acxa freeze in her tracks. What if they heard her sneaking into the backyard? What if they were a vigilante, like McClain? What if they got her? What if she was the next victim of the town?

A figure moved in the house. Acxa could see their shadow through the curtains. They seemed to be going to retrieve something.

She waited until their back was turned. Or at least until it seemed as if their back was turned.

She snuck around to the back of the house.

The hex master was waiting for her, hood drawn over his face, arms folded over his chest, and cape swaying in the breeze. He looked up as he heard her approach, a pair of eyes that seemed to glow violet watching her from beneath his hood.

“Good to see you made it,” he greeted.

“And the same to you.”

He glanced up at the full moon. “See anything on the way here?”

_A dead body._ “No.”

“No werewolves? No juggernaut?”

_I saw Sendak dead._ “Luckily, no, but thanks for the concern.”

He didn’t respond to her courtesy, looking back down at her numbly. She didn’t expect him to anyways. Out of all the members of the coven, he was the most distant. She wished he wasn’t. A strong team was one that was open with each other, after all.

“What’re my orders for tonight?”

She almost responded with “Hex whoever you want” but stopped herself. No, she wanted him to hex someone. She wanted him to hex someone to prevent all their deaths. For even if it wouldn’t kill him immediately, he would suffer so much worse in the end than he would if he died now.

“Lance McClain.”

The hex master watched her with violet eyes and repeated the name. “Lance McClain.”

She nodded. “Lance McClain.”

He seemed to think about it for a second and Acxa vaguely wondered if he had realized that that wasn’t who Haggar had ordered him to kill.

Finally, he nodded. “Lance McClain,” he repeated one last time before slinking off into the darkness without even so much as a goodbye or a “Vrepit sa”.

She watched him go, vaguely wondering if she had made the right choice in telling him to kill the vigilante. No, she decided. It would pay off in the end. She had no time to dwell over her decision. She had a job to do.

Clearing the topic from her mind, she turned and vanished into the dark, oblivious to the fact that someone had observed their entire conversation.

* * *

 

Lance had gone off into the bathroom to calm himself down, forget the body, maybe wash his face. Yet, now, there was no way he would calm down.

No, it wasn’t that someone-- no, at least two people were after him. He’d come to terms years ago that there would always be people after him. No, that wasn’t it.

That voice. Not the girl’s. Her voice was new. Her voice he had never heard. No, it was that boy… he knew that voice. He knew it well.

His gun. His rifle. He’d only killed two people so far. He had one bullet left.

And he knew now whose life it would end.


End file.
